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Saturday, July 1, 2017

RUSSIA-GATE IS DEAD AFTER CNN CUTS ITS OWN THROAT

WELL, LIKE IT OR NOT, TRUMP WAS CORRECT...CNN WAS CREATING 'FAKE NEWS' AS THEY THEMSELVES HAVE PROVEN THIS WEEK WITH A STRING OF 'REVELATIONS' BY THEIR OWN TOP BRASS. WE MIGHT EVEN SAY SOME EXECS AT CNN BECAME "WHISTLEBLOWERS" IN EXPOSING THEIR ANTI-TRUMP, 'THE RUSSIANS DID IT' FLOOD OF ARTICLES FORCED BY THEIR EXECUTIVES AND FAKED BY THEIR STAFF.

A PV journalist covertly filmed a candid discussion with CNN [health] producer John Bonifield, where the "Very Fake News" network employee admitted that the whole Russia story against President Trump is nothing more than a ratings grab by CNN's CEO Jeff Zucker - based on the fact that most of CNN's liberal audience wants to see the President go down in flames.

Bonifield also admitted that he hasn't seen any evidence of President Trump committing a crime.

John Bonifield: Even if Russia was trying to swing an election, we try to swing their elections, our CIA is doing shit all the time, we're out there trying to manipulate governments. I haven't seen any good enough evidence to show that the President committed a crime. I know a lot of people don't like him and they'd like to see him get kicked out of office.... but that's a lot different than he actually did something that can get him kicked out of office.

Russia is for ratings!

PV Journalist: Why is CNN constantly like "Russia this, Russia that?"

Bonifield: Because it's ratings. Our ratings are incredible right now. My boss, I shouldn't say this, my boss yesterday we were having a discussion about this dental shoot and he was like I just want you to know what we're up against here. Just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords. For a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN [Jeff Zucker] said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we're done with it. Let's get back to Russia. But all the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school, you're just like, that's adorable. That's adorable. This is a business.

John Bonifield was asked directly what he thinks about Russia... and responded with what many on the right have been saying for months; "If it was something really good, it would have already leaked":

PV Journalist: But honestly, you think the whole Russia shit is just bullshit?

Bonifield: Could be bullshit. I mean, it's mostly bullshit right now. Like, we don't have any giant proof. Then they say, "well there's still an investigation going on." I don't know, if they were finding something we would know about it. The way these leaks happen, they would leak it. They'd leak. If it was something really good, it'd leak. I just feel like they don't really have it but they want to keep digging. And so I think the President is probably right to say, like "look, you are witch hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof."

PROJECT VERITAS HAS HIT THE MOTHER-LODE! NOW OTHERS IN THE MSM ARE JUMPING ON THE "CNN IS FAKE NEWS" BANDWAGON, INCLUDING SOME HYPOCRITES WHO HAVE REPORTED THE SAME FAKE STORIES....IMAGINE THAT! AND SOME ARE EVEN CALLING FOR AN END TO THE CRIES OF "RUSSIA DID IT". "The “winning issue” of Russia is a losing issue."

Conducted last week, the Harvard-Harris national poll found a big disconnect between the Russia obsession of Democratic Party elites in Washington and voters around the country.

The poll “reveals the risks inherent for the Democrats, who are hoping to make big gains—or even win back the House—in 2018,” The Hill reported. “The survey found that while 58 percent of voters said they’re concerned that Trump may have business dealings with Moscow, 73 percent said they’re worried that the ongoing investigations are preventing Congress from tackling issues more vital to them.”“Frustrated Democrats hoping to elevate their election fortunes have a resounding message for party leaders: Stop talking so much about Russia,” The Hill reported over the weekend."

OTHER HEADLINES TELL IT LIKE IT IS... “Democrats Are Playing With Fire on Russia.” Still more interested in playing to the press gallery than speaking directly to the economic distress of voters in the Rust Belt and elsewhere who handed the presidency to Trump, top Democrats would much rather scapegoat Vladimir Putin than scrutinize how they’ve lost touch with working-class voters.

A much-ballyhooed report from the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper underwent a cogent critique by former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter Robert Parry. Stripping the 25-page DNI report down to its essence, Parry pointed out that it “contained no direct evidence that Russia delivered hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta to WikiLeaks.”

The national Democratic Party and many liberals have bet heavily on the Russia-gate investigation as a way to oust President Trump from office and to catapult Democrats to victories this year and in 2018, but the gamble appears not to be paying off.

RUSSIA-GATE IS MAYBE, FINALLY OVER, FOLKS. NOW IF ONLY CONGRESS WILL STOP WASTING OUR TAXPAYER MONEY DOING WHAT IT DID WHEN THE BIG BUZZ WAS BENGHAZI... DARE WE DREAM?

ALSO YESTERDAY, ANOTHER BLOW THAT SHOULD HELP FINISH OFF THE DEMOCRATS' CRIES ABOUT TRUMP AND THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION... JOHN PODESTA, FACED WITH NOW-KNOWN FACTS THAT THE CLINTON CAMPAIGN AND HE, PERSONALLY, GOT FAR MORE MONETARY 'HELP' FROM THE RUSSIANS THAN TRUMP EVER DREAMED OF, DID WHAT HE DOES BEST...HE LIED.AFTER THAT, PODESTA COULD ONLY SQUIRM AND TRY TO DENY. SEE THAT, IN A VIDEO CLIP ON THE WEBSITE LINKED BELOW.Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo invited former Hillary Clinton campaign chair, John Podesta as a guest to discuss his Wednesday closed-door session with the House panel.

Bartiromo: “John, I gotta ask you about your own ties to Russian entities. You joined the board of a small energy company in 2011, 2 months later a Russia entity directly funded by the Kremlin invested $35 million in the company. You were given 75,000 shares in a Russian company which you failed to disclose when you became an Obama associate.”

HE NEVER DENIES HE GOT THOSE SHARES OR THE MONEY THAT CAME WITH THEM.

Podesta: “Maria that’s not true. I fully disclosed it and was fully compliant…and by the way I divested before I went to the White House…”

Bartiromo was not letting John Podesta off the hook easy. She immediately said, “But where did you divest it, John? Why do people say you divested to your adult children?”

Podesta became visibly angry and accused Bartiromo of “picking through his emails that were stolen by the Russians and released by Wikileaks.”

WE NOW KNOW, ALMOST WITH 100% CERTAINTY, THAT THOSE EMAILS WERE DELIVERED TO WIKILEAKS BY SOMEONE "ON THE INSIDE", NOT BY RUSSIA.

MARCH 21, 2017: Comey to Congress: Russians DID NOT Give Podesta’s Emails to WikiLeaks. (VIDEO OF HEARING TESTIMONY)The most important piece of information that Comey disclosed to Congress was that the Russians did not provide WikiLeaks with HIllary’s campaign manager John Podesta’s emails.The entire case that Democrats make that ‘Russia stole the election from Hillary’ is based on the premise that Russia supplied Podesta’s emails to WikiLeaks which then somehow led to Hillary’s defeat.

WE KNEW THIS LAST YEAR, AS SEVERAL EX-INTEL EMPLOYEES TRIED TO TELL AMERICA...

"The specter of a $100 million libel suit scared CNN into retracting a poorly reported story that slimed an ally of President Trump’s — and forcing out the staffers responsible for it, The Post has learned.Sources also said the three journalists responsible for the retracted story — reporter Tom Frank, editor Eric Lichtblau and Lex Haris, who headed the CNN Investigates unit — were urged to resign.

“They called them in and said they’d pay out their contracts, but they should leave immediately,” one source said.

Zucker was afraid of facing a high-profile suit from Scaramucci while the US Justice Department weighs the proposed $85.4 billion media merger."

THE NEW YORK TIMES DID A VERY LAME SEMI-'CORRECTION' TO ITS FAVORITE FAKE NEWS TALE AFTER CNN WAS BUSTED YESTERDAY.

"The New York Times has finally admitted that one of the favorite Russia-gate canards – that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred on the assessment of Russian hacking of Democratic emails – is false. On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.

In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by ONLY FOUR intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

WE KNEW THIS BACK IN MAY, VIA CLAPPER AND BRENNAN TESTIMONIES, BUT FEW AMERICANS WATCH THOSE HEARINGS VIDEOS.

Clapper testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 8 that the Russia-hacking claim came from a “special intelligence community assessment” (or ICA) produced by selected analysts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, “a coordinated product from three agencies – CIA, NSA, and the FBI – not all 17 components of the intelligence community,” the former DNI said.

Clapper further acknowledged that the analysts who produced the Jan. 6 assessment on alleged Russian hacking were “hand-picked” from the CIA, FBI and NSA.

Yet, as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you “hand-pick” the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion. For instance, if the analysts were known to be hard-liners on Russia or supporters of Hillary Clinton, they could be expected to deliver the one-sided report that they did.

But the Times’ belated correction also underscores the growing sense that the U.S. mainstream media has joined in a political vendetta against Trump and has cast aside professional standards to the point of repeating false claims designed to denigrate him.

That, in turn, plays into Trump’s Twitter complaints that he and his administration are the targets of a “witch hunt” led by the “fake news” media, a grievance that appears to be energizing his supporters and could discredit whatever ongoing investigations eventually conclude."

WELL, THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE SUMS IT ALL UP QUITE NICELY....

The Mad Chase for Russia-gate Prey June 30, 2017 "As the Russia-gate imbroglio proves, a grave danger in journalism comes when the pack is running headlong in pursuit of the same prey and casts aside normal standards of care and fairness, as Daniel Lazare explains.

June is turning out to be the cruelest month for the Russia-gate industry. The pain began on June 8 when ex-FBI Director James Comey testified that a sensational New York Times article declaring that “members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials” was “in the main … not true.”

Then came Republican Karen Handel’s June 20 victory in a special election in Georgia’s sixth congressional district, sparking bitter recriminations among Democrats who had hoped to ride to victory on a Russia-gate-propelled wave of resistance to Trump.

More evidence that the strategy was not working came a day later when the Harris Poll and Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies produced a devastating survey showing that 62 percent of voters see no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, while 54 percent believe the “Deep State” is trying to unseat the President by leaking classified information. The poll even showed a small bounce in Trump’s popularity, with 45 percent viewing him favorably as opposed to only 39 percent for his defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

On June 23, CNN retracted a story that had claimed that Congress was looking into reports that the Trump transition team met secretly with a Russian investment fund under sanction from the U.S. government. Three days later, CNN announced that three staffers responsible for the blooper – reporter and Pulitzer Prize-nominee Thomas Frank; Pulitzer-winner Eric Lichtblau, late of the New York Times; and Lex Haris, executive editor in charge of investigations – had resigned.

Adding to CNN’s embarrassment, Project Veritas, the brainchild of rightwing provocateur James O’Keefe, released an undercover video in which a CNN producer named John Bonifield explained that the network can’t stop talking about Russia because it boosts rating.

Project Veritas also released an undercover video interview with CNN contributor Van Jones calling the long-running probe into possible collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia a “nothing-burger,” a position similar to the skepticism that Jones has displayed in his on-air comments.

True, the Bonifield video was only a medical reporter sounding off about a story that he’s not even covering and doing so to a dirty-trickster who has received financing from Trump and who, after another undercover film stunt, was ordered in 2013 to apologize and pay $100,000 to an anti-poverty worker whose privacy he had invaded.

But, still, Bonifield’s “president-is-probably-right” comment is hard to shake. Ditto Van Jones’ “nothing-burger.” Unless both quotes are completely doctored, it appears that the scuttlebutt among CNNers is that Russia-gate is a lot of hot air but no one cares because it’s sending viewership through the roof.

And if that’s what CNN thinks, then it may be what MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow thinks as she also plays the Russia card for all it’s worth. It may also be what The Washington Post has in the back of its mind even while hyperventilating about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy.”

The New York Times also got caught up in its enthusiasm to hype the Russia-gate case on June 25 when it ran a story slamming Trump for “refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks [on Democratic emails], and did it to help get him elected.”

So, on June 29, the Times apparently found itself with no choice but to issue a correction stating: “The [Russia-hacking] assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

THE DOG RETURNS TO IT VOMIT....NOTHING LEARNED, OR ARE THEY JUST PLAIN RABID?Despite the correction, the Times soon returned to its pattern of shading the truth regarding the U.S. intelligence assessment. On June 30, a Times article reported: “Mr. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the unanimous conclusion of United States intelligence agencies that Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 race.”

The Times’ phrase “unanimous conclusion” conveys the false impression that all 17 agencies were onboard without specifically saying so, although we now know that the Times’ editors are aware that only selected analysts from three agencies plus the DNI’s office were involved.

In other words, the Times cited a “unanimous conclusion of United States intelligence agencies” to mislead its readers without specifically repeating the “all-17-agencies” falsehood. This behavior suggests that the Times is so blinded by its anti-Trump animus that it wants to conceal from its readers how shaky the whole tale is.

Holes from the Start

But the problems with Russia-gate date back to the beginning. Where Watergate was about a real burglary, this one began with a cyber break-in that may or may not have occurred.

In his June 8 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey conceded that the FBI never checked the DNC’s servers to confirm that they had truly been hacked.

COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN RICHARD BURR: Did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the data that they had collected?

COMEY: In the case of the DNC, and, I believe, the DCCC [i.e. the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee], but I’m sure the DNC, we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. But we didn’t get direct access.

BURR: But no content?

COMEY: Correct.

BURR: Isn’t content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?

Comey’s trust in CrowdStrike was akin to cops trusting a private eye not only to investigate a murder, but to determine if it even occurred. Yet the mainstream media’s pack journalists saw no reason to question the FBI because doing so would not accord with an anti-Trump bias so pronounced that even journalism profs have begun to notice.

Doubts about CrowdStrikeSince CrowdStrike issued its findings, it has come under wide-ranging criticism.

ACTUALLY, IT'S A JOKE AMONG COMPUTER EXPERTS AND 'NERDS' EVERYWHERE. WHAT THE PRESS IS CALLING "HACKING" WAS NOT EVEN GOOD "SPEAR PHISHING", THE COMPUTER WIZARDS SAY.

The Ukrainian ministry of defense and the London think tank from which CrowdStrike obtained much of its data agreed that the company didn’t know what it was talking about. But if CrowdStrike was wrong about the Ukraine case, how could everyone be sure it was right about the DNC?

In March, Wikileaks went public with its “Vault 7” findings showing, among other things, that the CIA has developed sophisticated software in order to scatter false clues – which inevitably led to dark mutterings that maybe the agency had hacked the DNC itself in order to blame it on the Russians.

Finally, although Wikileaks policy is never to comment on its sources, Julian Assange, the group’s founder, decided to make an exception.“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,” he told journalist John Pilger in November. “Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”

Then there is poor Mike Flynn, driven out as national security adviser after just 24 days in office for allegedly misrepresenting conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – exchanges during the Trump transition that supposedly exposed him to the possibility of Russian blackmail although U.S. intelligence was monitoring the talks and therefore knew their exact contents. And, since the Russians no doubt assumed as much, it’s hard to see what they could have blackmailed him with. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Turning Gen. Flynn into Road Kill.”]

Yet the mainstream media eagerly gobbled up this blackmail possibility while presenting with a straight face the claim by Obama holdovers at the Justice Department that the Flynn-Kislyak conversations might have violated the 1799 Logan Act, an ancient relic that has never been used to prosecute anyone in its entire two-century history.

Although it’s impossible to say what evidence might eventually emerge, Russia-gate is looking more and more like a Democratic version of Benghazi, a pseudo-scandal that no one could ever figure out but which wound up making Hillary Clinton look like a persecuted hero and the Republicans seem like obsessed idiots.

As much as that epic inquiry turned out to be mostly a witch-hunt, Americans are beginning to sense the same about Washington’s latest game of “gotcha.”

The United States is still a democracy in some vague sense of the word, and “We the People” are losing patience with subterranean maneuvers on the part of the Democrats, the neoconservatives, and the intelligence agencies seeking to reverse a presidential election.

Like Benghazi or possibly even the Birthergate scam about President Obama’s Kenyan birthplace, the whole convoluted Russia-gate tale grows stranger by the day."

THERE IS NOT ONE RUSSIAN ENTITY MENTIONED BY THE MSM WHOM BOTH CAMPAIGNS AND THE MAJORITY OF CONGRESS HAVE NOT HAD CONTACT WITH.

RUSSIA IS NOT "THE BIG BAD WOLF" IN ALL THIS...OUR ELITIST TWO-PARTY SYSTEM, OUR LYING POLITICIANS, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHO PROPAGANDIZE TO GET THEM ELECTED ARE THE WOLVES IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING HERE, PEOPLE OF AMERICA.

WE'VE BEEN LIED TO, SCAMMED, MILKED DRY AND HUNG OUT ON A SAGGING LINE FOR DECADES IN THE SAME WAY BY THE SAME PUPPET-MASTERS.

EVERY TIME SOMETHING GOES WRONG, EVERY TIME A LIE IS EXPOSED, EVERY TIME WE COULD SIMPLY LOOK BEHIND THAT CURTAIN AND SEE THE REAL "WIZARD OF OZ", WE LOOK AWAY AND DO AS WE'RE TOLD...BLAME THE "OTHER SIDE", BLAME THE "OTHER PARTY". VOTE THE PARTY TICKET, KEEP THE "EXPERIENCED" POLITICIANS WHO HAVE SCREWED US REPEATEDLY.

AFTER EVERY ELECTION, WHEN THE LIES BECOME OBVIOUS, MOST AMERICANS VOW "NEVER AGAIN! THEY FOOLED ME ONCE, BUT NEVER AGAIN!"

THEN COMES THE NEXT ELECTION AND VOTERS DO ALL THEY CAN TO GET THEIR DAMNED, DESPICABLE, UNETHICAL, MONEY-HUNGRY, CONSTITUTION-SHREDDING, OATH-BREAKING SAME OLD TRAITORS ELECTED AGAIN.